Change Your Way of Thinking
I had a roommate briefly who had cerebral palsy that had twisted his body and made his speech almost unintelligible to the able world and he had a pet boa constrictor. The roommate, who I’ll call Tom, worked for the Passaic County Welfare Board and was perpetually horny, really horny and really frustrated.
We lived together for only a few months back in the early 1970s and we never socialized together because I always felt uncomfortable with him and I’m sure he knew that and I don’t know why, maybe because I thought that others might see us together and judge me to also be disabled or maybe I just thought I was somehow superior to him and could do much better. Either way, it’s pretty shameful because looking back, I am sure that Tom would have jumped at the chance to socialize at a bar or even go to a movie with a friend and who knows, maybe I would have liked it.
People didn’t look at Tom and think what is Tom like, they looked at him and all the could see was a twisted body and slurred speech and it took work and patience to understand him. When people see the Toms of the world, they’ll often turn away or back up in barely undisguised disgust, almost as if they either blame the person for his disability or fear it will somehow be catching. There is this broad brush misunderstanding that all people with disabilities are unable to function, are weak, damaged goods, may even be dangerous and that all differences are the same, from cerebral palsy and Down syndrome to autism and blindness.
I have thought of Tom frequently over the years and I feel ashamed of how I shunned him. I wonder how he made out in life facing such incredibly difficult obstacles and ostracism and whether he was still horny and I would expect that his stubborn refusal to be denied because of his disability has served him fairly well but I’m not so sure he was able to develop a relationship and satisfy his perpetual horniness. Tom was and will always be different than most of us although inside he was very much the same as many of us with the same human needs from sexuality to friendship.
It has been 31 years since passage of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act which guaranteed accommodations to public places and outlawed discrimination. Changing the size of bathrooms, installing elevators, were the relatively easy part; changing perceptions is still stubborn, old lies die very slowly and most of us live in a world of stereotypes and bigotry based on fear and miseducation. Millions of people had to fight for many years for the right to get into a bathroom when it should have been their right all along as Americans. How demeaning, dehumanizing and just embarrassing to be unable to maneuver a wheelchair into a bathroom just to satisfy one of the most basic of human needs.
We have so many assumptions, misunderstandings, lost opportunities about people who may not walk like most of us or talk like most of us or speak like most of us. These are the people who might as well wear a sandwich sign or a target declaring they are disabled, a sign that is a wall in preventing many of us from seeing past the differences to understand that the faceless, nameless people with disabilities get lonely, laugh out loud, get fearful, can be hateful, get embarrassed, enjoy movies, listen to opera and get horny, just like many of the rest of us. How much despair and stress they must endure because the majority has judged them different, as if their physical or intellectual limitations aren’t enough to fight. And don’t for a moment think that people with disabilities are not aware of the unfairness of it all because they are painfully aware, they see the looks, the disturbed glances and they know what they mean.
Most people don’t think about people with disabilities, beyond glancing at the ubiquitous signs with the stick figure of a person in a wheelchair above the words “handicapped parking.” They’ll see a contorted figure guiding his wheelchair down the aisle of the supermarket and they’ll feel pity or if the wheelchair is blocking the aisle, they may feel impatient and downright hostile. They’ll pass by an otherwise typical looking woman and hear her talking to herself in the produce section and quickly she is consigned to the crazy category, not to mingle with the rest of us sane ones.
There’s the scene in the convenience store where a young man who stutters so much that it hurts his mouth to talk and all he wants is a Coke and he is blocking the line of people that is growing longer and more impatient, waiting for the young man to just get to the point, something that he tries valiantly to do and what those irritated people don’t know is that this person who seems unable to speak is a student in a university master’s program in international relations.
A 30-year-old woman walks with difficulty, gets exasperated and frustrated easily, acting out inappropriately and she so desperately wants a friend but her actions sabotage any hope for friendship. And yet, she doesn’t know how to act differently and she is trapped and judged just like the man with cerebral palsy and the young man who stutters. She is with a group in a restaurant where the server approaches and asks the typical person at the table just what the disabled person might want to order, assuming that the person with a disability couldn’t possibly say the words “cheeseburger and fries.” And the person with a disability gets angry at the insult.
The ADA requires employers, businesses, public facilities, transportation and telecommunications to make accommodations for a disabled person whose physical or mental impairment gets in the way of major life activities. While accommodating people with invisible disabilities is mandated by law, what specifically constitutes a disability is vague.
The Center for Disability Rights (C.D.R.) lists the following “invisible” disabilities: Learning differences, deafness, autism, prosthetics, Traumatic Brain Injury (T.B.I.), mental health disabilities, Usher syndrome, bipolar disorder, diabetes, A.D.D./A.D.H.D., fibromyalgia, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, anxiety, sleep disorder, Crohn’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and cystic fibrosis.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports there are 61 million adults with a disability in the United States and that gets down to a whole lot of lonely people who have been shunted into the shadows so as not to inconvenience most of us. The CDC reports that 26 percent of adults in the United States have some type of disability, including:
13.7 percent of people with a disability have a mobility disability with serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs.
10.8 percent of people with a disability have a cognition disability with serious difficulty concentrating, remembering or making decisions.
6.8 percent of people with a disability have an independent living disability with difficulty doing errands alone.
5.9 percent of people with a disability are deaf or have serious difficulty hearing.
4.6 percent of people with a disability have a vision disability with blindness or serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses.
3.6 percent of people with a disability have a self-care disability with difficulty dressing or bathing.
What a disgrace that so many people are treated so poorly.